Boys And Their Toys: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Troubled Playthings Book 1)

by Tiffany Sala

  Amanda usually ended up keeping us half an hour late tidying up the store before the next day, but once she was satisfied with the state of things she was always out of there faster than I really believed was physically possible. She managed to slip past the first set of traffic lights out of our mall carpark without stopping; I didn’t.

  I was sitting there, humming a little to myself and debating Chinese or Indian, when the shifting of a shadow across my back seat made me tense.

  It wasn’t a shadow. I saw it clearly now I was paying attention to it: that was a black blanket, and it had not been there when I’d first headed into work.

  I opened my mouth to scream, even though it made no sense to cry out when the only person near enough to hear wouldn’t care, and his arm shot out and wrapped around one side of my seat, covering my mouth and pressing me against the headrest. Another hand moved around the other side to fall on my shoulder, and then slid forwards and down, his fingers skimming the side of my breast the same way he’d done the first time we were properly alone together.

  Memories flooded my head; arousal flooded the rest of my body.

  “Now,” whispered Lucas, whose face I couldn’t see, “you’d better save the energy you were about to put into yelling for help into actually driving, because the roads around here are dangerous after dark, and you’ve got a bit of a track record for attracting trouble.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “You broke into my car,” was all I could think to say once he actually let go of my mouth.

  “Is it really breaking in if you had a key the whole time, I wonder?” Lucas mused.

  “You—since you gave it to me?”

  “How else am I supposed to get in without damaging the damn thing?”

  My stomach was heaving. All that personal development I’d just been feeling so smug about—gone in an instant. He had that power over me, and now he was paying attention to me again I was wondering, had all of this just been me trying to make myself into the kind of girl he was able to respect? An order of his own choosing.

  I’d just let him inspire me. That was all it was. Right?

  “You’d better get back to it,” Lucas told me. “Fucking around at lights is what got you into trouble the first time, I seem to remember.”

  “What got me into trouble was trying to say no to you,” I corrected him.

  “I suppose so.” My heart had slowed down much more quickly than all the other times Lucas had done something to screw with me. I didn’t think even a driving instructor would have faulted my acceleration back into the flow of traffic.

  “I see your arm is better,” I observed. I couldn’t have helped counting one hand on each of my shoulders, his shifting fingers still blatantly over the line of what was appropriate.

  “Well it’s been several weeks, so it’s healed up nicely,” Lucas agreed. “I’ve just got the cast off a few days ago, so I’m still working on getting the muscles back in order.”

  That arm had seemed strong enough when he was trying to stop me from making noise, but I knew better than to argue with him. “What do you want, Lucas?” I asked.

  “It’s about the arm, actually,” he told me. “Feels great to have the use of it again, but it’s still far too weak to take care of some of the things it’s good at… if you know what I mean.”

  “Really?” I knew what he meant, all right. “You’re going to break into my car for a handjob? Do you not have enough actually gagging girls on hand, if you’ll excuse the pun, to take care of it for you? Or is your entire stable of interested women a fakery?”

  “I see you’re working alongside that woman who sold us your phone,” he said, because of course he could see exactly where I was going with those jabs.

  “A coincidence,” I said, my voice so confident I almost believed myself. “I took advantage of the fact that she’d seen me before to get my nose in the door. I know now that she has a husband and there was never any chance of her coming after a little boy like you, but that was just a happy side-effect.”

  “You’re lying about the coincidence part,” Lucas told me, “but I’m willing to ignore that because I’m actually impressed.”

  “I have to say I’m not terribly interested in whether you’re impressed or disgusted or whatever. I’m hungry and I need to go pick up dinner.”

  “You’re probably earning a lot more than you were back at your old place,” Lucas said, “but I’d like to come too, and pay for the both of us.”

  Now his hands were right over the top of my breasts, squeezing gently. “Are you belted in back there?” I asked, and he let go of me quick. “Thank you,” I told him. I was actually surprised. “The last thing I need right now is to be stopped by the police and have my licence taken from me just because you can’t follow rules.”

  “It’d suit me,” he offered. “Now. Where are we going for dinner?”

  “I’m going to drive you to wherever you left your car,” I told him, “and then you’re going to hand over the spare key you’ve gotten yourself and I’m going to go eat dinner by myself.”

  “Car’s at home,” said Lucas. “I walked to you.”

  “You walked all that way? That’s—”

  “Insane?” I couldn’t help peeking in my rear-view mirror and that cursed full-teeth grin nearly undid me. “You’ve got to do something a bit next-level when a girl won’t take your calls, Callie.”

  “But you never called me.” This whole conversation was leaving me dizzy like I was the one who’d run the risk of concussing myself through sheer stupidity.

  That was what Lucas did. He talked people into bewilderment and then had them going along with whatever he wanted. I should never have kept driving with him in my car, I should have gotten him out as quickly as possible… but Amanda’s words were in my head, and now I couldn’t help wondering: taking Lucas’s utter recklessness completely out of the equation for the moment, as insane as that sounded, was the long-lasting connection between us really something I could just completely ignore?

  I’d never wanted a boyfriend at this stage of my life. It had always seemed like something I couldn’t afford. But this was beyond stupid ideas about boyfriends.

  Amanda hadn’t been interested in pursuing Lucas after all… and now I wondered if he would have really gone after her if he had the opportunity. It was entirely possible he’d just been messing with me the whole time. What I was certain of was that Amanda was the kind of woman who genuinely did interest Lucas on some level. He’d been enthusiastic about engaging with her, but it hadn’t made him behave the way he had to me. I was certain she would have told me if she’d thought the guy who was my boyfriend at the time had tried to cheat on me.

  Maybe he just hadn’t been interested, the same way he hadn’t been interested in me outside of getting to play with me sexually now and then. Or maybe… maybe he’d sensed something in her that made him want to give her more respect. Even without loving her.

  As for me, I had an idea he really had caught feelings at some point, but I also knew it was no longer enough. I had to get to the bottom of this situation… and I had to give myself a deadline.

  Then again, I realised there was another deadline coming up. We were graduating in just over three months. Once I no longer had to deal with school, I would probably find myself a job with longer hours, try to save myself from falling down the same welfare-supported hole my parents had. I might even be able to move away—and for that matter, I didn’t expect Lucas to stick around in this reasonably small and totally backwater town for the rest of his life. Even if he had a bit of a crush on me now and was bored of all the other girls who could be stealing him away from me, there was that big schoolies party all the new high school graduates attended—which Lucas seemed bound to go to, and I would definitely not be able to afford—where he would meet lots of girls to make him forget about me. Soon enough our separation would be inevitable.

  Realising that made me feel better about the whole thing. Soon enoug
h the decision would be made for me whether I liked it or not.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go have Chinese together. But maybe you could try not kidnapping me in my own car the next time you want to go out with me, huh?”

  “I’ll take that feedback on notice,” Lucas said. “Now, I happen to know a good place.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The ‘place’ Lucas directed me to was a full-blown restaurant, the interior decked out in sumptuous red with white tablecloths, the walls covered in prints I was sure were great examples of traditional Chinese art I of course knew nothing about.

  When he told the girl at the front counter we intended to eat in, I stopped still in the doorway.

  “Don’t make me turn you over my knee and spank you in front of an audience,” Lucas murmured when tugging on my hand failed to move me.

  “I thought your arm was still too weak to spank anything?”

  Lucas showed me it certainly wasn’t too weak to get me moving from my position. Once I’d staggered a few steps forward, I gave in to the idea of a public dinner.

  “I hate restaurants,” I said into his ear as we walked in. “I’ve only been to eat at them a few times but I always feel like everyone must be watching and judging me for never knowing which fork or spoon or chopstick I’m supposed to use or whatever.”

  “I’m glad you told me,” Lucas said. “It’s past time for you to learn to get past that. I can help you.” He put an arm around me as we met the girl from the counter inside the eating area, his hand on my hip as she led us over to a far-too-intimate booth on the far side of the room. He accepted a menu on my behalf when I was too busy feeling awkward about the whole situation to notice it was being offered to me, and actually spoke in Chinese to the girl after ordering some tea for each of us.

  “Besides,” he continued once she was gone. I was barely able to pick up the thread of the previous conversation. “You actually look pretty good in your new style of work clothes. Much less like a teenage girl trying to impress her dad’s work colleagues.”

  It was about the rudest remark I could imagine, but I couldn’t even deal with it at that moment. “You speak Chinese?”

  “My parents paid for Lucy and I to have a tutor.” Lucas shrugged like this was no big deal. I was pretty sure some of the kids in our class who were actually born to Chinese parents didn’t really know how to speak the language. “Lucy only stuck with it while she was desperate for something to keep her distracted during the worst of her treatment and then dropped out once she was in remission, but I kept going. Mum is always telling people about how good I am, even though I’m pretty average really. I think she’s got it in her head that I might be able to follow in her footsteps, you know, go bring the latest hot technology over from Asia. That’s where all the innovation is now, but Mum never did make it over there, she says she’s too old now to learn everything she’d need to be really successful. It’s up to me to maintain the Starling family honour I guess.”

  He leaned over towards me and added, smirking, “Your face, Callie, honestly. I just said thank you to her, and I’m not that sure she understood either. She mostly just looked annoyed with me.”

  Teas were quickly thrust in front of us, as well as a tray of strange chips I didn’t remember Lucas ordering that was clearly a normal part of the meal.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t order wine for us, honestly,” I said.

  “How am I supposed to know if you’re into it or not if you’re blind drunk?” Lucas actually looked outraged, like I was trying to accuse him of something truly heinous—which I was, but apparently I’d misjudged him. Or he wanted me to think I’d misjudged him.

  I had a vague feeling I should apologise, but what came out of my mouth instead was far from apologetic. “Maybe I was hoping to loosen you up a bit with something alcoholic myself, so you’d answer a few of my questions.”

  I could tell he rather liked that I’d said something so provocative, because he shot me his beautiful full grin. I had kissed that mouth, I realised, the images bursting into my mind as if they had been trying to force themselves through for a while—and that mouth had been a few other places too. I was suddenly very glad to be already sitting down, and to have a table in front of me to hide some of my nervous fidgeting.

  “You know, Callie,” Lucas said, “maybe I’d be happy to answer some of your questions. But I’m not going to make it easy for you. You have to make me want to.”

  I stared down at my cup of tea as he reached across the booth to take my hand in both of his. I had a feeling I knew the sort of motivation he was hinting at.

  “And you know what I mean,” he added. He drew my hand up to his mouth and pressed those smirking lips right down in the middle of the back of it…

  Then he dropped my hand. Almost flung it back at me, actually. It barely missed my tea.

  “What the fuck?” he muttered.

  “I think that’s what I should be asking you.” I rubbed the side of my hand where it had banged against the table.

  A server came to take our order then, so I had no opportunity to press him further. When I admitted I didn’t really know what most of the menu items were, Lucas took over the ordering process. That was fine by me, because it gave me an opportunity to study him and try to figure out what could have set him off like that.

  And it didn’t take me long to figure something out.

  Once we were alone again, I leaned in—but I could see he was ready to fight me off now.

  Too bad for him I knew exactly what to say. “Did you remember the last time you did that to me, just then?”

  “That actually happened?” Lucas said with such genuine confusion, I estimated the chances he was being deliberately evasive were low.

  “Lucy said to me, a while ago, that I shouldn’t connect the things you did back then to the things you did now. She said you were a completely different person as a kid, basically.” Lucas shrugged. “I figured she was just, you know, well, anyone who went through the shit you did in your family would be changed forever from the experience. Until this moment, I never thought that she could have meant you literally didn’t remember who you were back then.”

  “She probably didn’t,” Lucas said. “Or maybe she did… who knows? Being a twin is strange shit, Callie. There’s this person who came into the world by your side and no matter how your lives go in different directions the older you get, they always seem to know things about you that other people would have to be told to understand. But Lucy definitely would have remembered if I was different back then. I think she has the opposite problem to me. She remembers a hell of a lot more than anyone would want to.”

  It seemed guessing Lucas’s secret had entitled me to full disclosure. “Can you remember nothing from back then?”

  “Well I don’t think most people have really strong memories from their first ten years or so,” Lucas said. “Not based on what other people have told me, not at our age.” I thought back over my own childhood and nodded. Some of the strongest memories I had were from that whole time Lucas had been messing with me. “But it’s a bit different for me. I literally have almost nothing. This one flash of my family going to Disneyland for summer holidays, which is fucking stupid because I’ve never liked Disneyland, the odd little thing that comes to me now and then with no context whatsoever, and other than that I might as well have not existed at that time at all. And there was a specific moment it happened too, not long after Lucy’s diagnosis got really dire. I just woke up one morning and my parents, my sister, they were like complete strangers to me all of a sudden. I knew their names, I understood who they were… but that history was just gone, except for that one fucking stupid roller coaster.”

  “What did the doctors say?” I asked.

  Lucas’s perfect nails left creases in the tablecloth. “I didn’t fucking tell anyone to take me to a doctor, did I? I mean how the fuck could I? At first I was just kind of shocked, so I went around with the parents and Lucy
and didn’t say anything, just tried to quietly figure out who the fuck I was and why all this weird shit was happening. Then, once I had it clear how bad Lucy was, I wasn’t exactly going to start butting in saying I needed this or that. My parents were spending every fucking moment they could on Lucy, or trying to keep the money coming in so we could get Lucy whatever she needed. My stupid problems couldn’t be a priority.”

  “It wasn’t their fault,” I said, as softly as I could. “But they neglected you. That must have been hard.”

  “Ah, Callie,” said Lucas, “what you call neglect I prefer to refer to as a really impressive product of my absolutely incredible ability to hide what’s really going on with me.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that, but Lucas clearly felt no need to fill in the silence now that we had entered into this game. He put his hands together and watched me while I consistently failed to come up with any way to deal with this situation, until rice arrived along with the first of our dishes for sharing, when he took great pleasure in putting himself forward to help me make sense of the whole setup. For a while, we just enjoyed sharing the meal.

  I suspected his thoughts, like mine, were anything but the dignified tinkling we made of our forks and spoons as we ate. (I also had a feeling Lucas would have been perfectly comfortable with the originally offered chopsticks, but he asked for cutlery after I did.)

  I now had a lot of pieces of information that seemed to come together to answer some questions Lucas might not have been able to consciously answer himself if asked. There was the way he treated me, the insane scenes he dragged me into…. was it all a product of his fear that all the memories he cared about could be taken from him at any time?